Facebook in APR: interference in the political process under the pretext of combating disinformation

Yesterday Facebook announced the creation of an operating centre in
Singapore which aim is to control political advertising and news about the
elections to be held in the Asia-Pacific region. Experts of the centre will
monitor the information distributed in Facebook and Instagram social networks,
as well as in WhatsApp messenger and, if necessary, will remove “fake
messages” and “misleading political advertising”.

The upcoming presidential election will be held in Indonesia on April
17. Facebook has already temporarily banned electoral advertising purchased
outside the country. The company will use a combination of automatic and human
moderation to monitor political advertising concerning Indonesia.

The creation of the centre in the Asia-Pacific region is a logical step
in Facebook’s new strategy of combating political advertising, which was a
response to the pressure of the US Congress’s Democratic faction. The social
network has already tested its technology in identifying fake news during the
November elections to the House of Representatives and blocked the purchase of
advertising at the recent presidential elections in Nigeria on February 23.

The key question about Facebook’s actions arising immediately – what is
the method of detecting misleading advertising? Sometimes it’s practically
impossible to identify “fake” news at once, especially if the news is
presented by the news agency in the form of an exclusive, and this, as we
remember, often happens during elections and military conflicts. In addition, the
term “misleading political advertising” may be interpreted in many
different ways, and, most likely, Europe, Asia, and Africa will not define it
the same way.

So far, Facebook has been extremely cautious. Only about 400 ads were
removed during the elections to the House of Representatives in the US from May
to October. But, given the expansion of Facebook into new regions and
constantly growing investments in tools to control publications not only from
Facebook but also from Twitter, Mozilla, Google, etc., we can predict that the
number of publications for monitoring and the number of ads deleted will
multiply, and gradually human moderation will be almost completely replaced by
the machine.

In
an attempt to prevent possible accusations Facebook has taken on
responsibilities that perhaps it never should have. This policy may lead to a
situation when this social network will “play” for those political
players who have a similar to the West understanding of the electoral process
and the political system. In case of divergent views on the country’s further
development, such leaders and parties will simply lose a channel for
disseminating information, which contradicts the freedom of speech principle.
This will become actual meddling in the third country’s elections, which will
certainly benefit Europe and the US, as technology giants will support those
whose goals they share, even if it does not always meet the demand of the local
population.

However,
it is more likely that advertisers will be improving ways of presenting
information and political campaigning because Facebook is always lagging behind
– campaign managers are always one step ahead. In other words, fakes will
become harder to detect. Will this make the elections fairer? Quite the
opposite.

Alexander Minin – Vice-President of the Center for socio-economic and geopolitical studies (St. Petersburg), written expressly for IAC